


Thread

by Athelred (TheLatePapers)



Series: Separation [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Anna Ripley is a monster, Blood and Gore, Canonical Character Death, Demonic Possession, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Needles, Non-Consensual Touching, Rape/Non-con Elements, Shared Pain and Emotions Soulmates, Torture, Trauma, comfort is coming it's just that the hurt has to come first
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2018-12-10 12:29:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11691666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLatePapers/pseuds/Athelred
Summary: Vex goes through a week of pain and horror that isn't hers and can't run fast enough to stop it. Her soulmate leaves her in her sleep, and she never speaks of them again.Percy loses his family, himself, and makes a deal with a demon. The blank space where his soulmate used to be seems no more than he deserves.(Hurt/comfort bingo fill for "grief")





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For more spoilery and specific warnings please check the end notes. 
> 
> This is a soulmate au featuring feeling your soulmates pain and an empathetic bond. The structure of it is heavily borrowed from the Bound and Determined Series by cesare and helens78, which is some a+ stuff if you haven't read it. Love me a soulmate au deconstruction. 
> 
> also: _lines that look like this are emotions being pushed through the bond_
> 
>  
> 
> _they can't exchange real words but can articulate themselves pretty clearly with feelings_
> 
>  
> 
> I might write a little prequel for this about when they first felt one another but nothing I've tried has felt right yet ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

 

> _Your absence has gone through me_
> 
> _Like thread through a needle._
> 
> _Everything I do is stitched with its color._
> 
> _Separation by W.S. Merwin_

 

 

She had only had her soulmate for a short time when it happened.

Vex was standing at a market stall, mid-haggle with a merchant when the sudden flood of terror filled her mind, accompanied swiftly by a sharp ache in the side of her head. A whimper crawled its way out of her throat and she leaned heavily against the stand, a hand moving almost unconsciously to the nape of her neck where the bond nestled under her skin. The fear and horror flooded through her like she had dived into an ice flow, locking up her muscles as another shot of blunt agony manifested across her stomach, making her double over and retch.

The merchant was asking if she was alright. But Vex was lost in a cocoon of shared pain and couldn’t process the words. She was vaguely aware of all the attention she was attracting, of a stranger’s hand on her shoulder, someone saying, “Miss?” with concern as though there was any possible way she could respond through the fear now heaving through her like sobs. Maybe it was her that was sobbing. She didn’t know anymore. All she knew was that she had to find them. Now.

She had to keep them safe. She had to stop this.

Shrugging off that hands that were touching her, she shoved through the crowd that had gathered around her. She didn’t know where she was going, but she knew it was towards her soulmate. It had to be. Because she had to find them. She would find them. Please, gods, let her find them. Horrible shock shuddered through her, her face stung as though she’d been slapped, and she began to run blindly, desperately.

North, they were north, she managed that much coherence. That was where she’d been drawn to before this nightmare. She could go north. She could do that. Horrible pressure crushed her arms and she cried out in pain and frustration, pumping her legs faster. Determination and instinct honed from years making a life in rough corners saw her through the streets toward the edge of town without crashing into anything.

She wasn’t sure how long she ran before there was a final spike of fear from the bond so sharp that it felt as though someone had plunged a sword into her back. The soulbond went hazy and muddled as her soulmate fell unconscious and Vex quickly followed them down.

 

* * *

 

Vex failed to meet Vax at their spot when he had finished lightening some purses in the crowded market. She never failed to beat him to their rendezvous points, so simply the lack of her waiting for him set him sparking with anxiety. When half an hour passed, Vex still hadn’t appeared and Vax had very nearly chewed a hole through his cheek as he tried to work off nervous tension.

She must have run out to Trinket in the woods.

He shoved the darker options for her absence down to the back of his mind, and set off for the woods. Having a target made it easier not to think about what else could have stopped his twin from showing up where she was meant to.

To not consider why the Clasp’s symbol marked the back of his neck.

(If his two soulmates sent threads of question and comfort through the bond, Vax refused to acknowledge it.)

When Vax found her, she was curled in a tight ball half a mile outside of town, with a protective and confused Trinket standing over her.

“Sis?” he said, crouching beside her, hesitant to touch.

There was no response. She just remained curled up, trembling.

“Vex. Please, whats wrong? What happened?” Vax said.

Trinket groaned balefully at him, the bear’s shoulders were slumped and he pressed his head against Vax’s side. Vax buried a hand in his scruff and sank to sit cross legged in front of his silent twin.

“I know, buddy, I know.” he said as the bear moaned again.

Vex’s shaking stopped after ten minutes or so, but she remained tightly curled into herself for some time after that. Eventually, she lifted her head and ran her hands over her hair, unfolding to mirror his own posture. Trinket tore himself from Vax and pressed as much of himself into Vex’s lap as he could. She immediately buried her face in his neck, plastering herself to him.

Before her face was swallowed by fur, Vax saw that it was tear stained and pale.

“Vex?” he said again, still hesitant to reach out to her.

She heaved a deep breath and nodded, her face still buried against her bear.

“What happened?”

It was another moment before she answered, steeling herself against whatever it was she was going to say.

“Something terrible.” Her voice was a raspy ghost of itself.

He waited.

“My...my soulmate…” her voice cracked open entirely on the word and she took another moment to breathe deeply before speaking again, “I don’t know what happened. But they’re so scared, Vax, and someone was hurting them and—”

She pulled back from Trinket and Vax pulled her into his arms, clutching at her tightly. She returned his hold just as fiercely.

“Are they still…?” Vax asked. The unfinished question was a dead weight in the air around them.

She shook her head and pulled back, sitting up straighter and fiddling with the end of her braid, “They’re alive. They’re unconscious right now, but they’re still there.” Her voice was unnervingly steady, “I have to find them, Vax.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we do. Where do we go?”

“North. All I’ve got is north, I — oh no.” the last words were little more than a breath and a shiver ran through her, “They just woke up. They’re so scared, Vax, I don’t know what to do.”

“We find them.” He stood, reaching up a hand to pull her up as well, “Come on.”

Trinket, who had lain down beside them while they spoke, hauled himself to his feet.

Vex held on to his hand as she tugged him in a direction he assumed must be north, since she was the half of their pair that actually had a sense of direction. There was no need to head back into the town, not now. They carried their whole lives with them, and the other half of his sister’s soul was on the line. If the Clasp found themselves wondering where he had gone, they could go fuck themselves.

They travelled a day and a night without stopping, always headed north.

Then Vex started screaming.

 

* * *

 

Percy had his eyes closed tightly as Ripley ran her blade lightly over the flesh of his stomach. He was naked, she’d cut away his clothes when he was first given to her. He had no idea how long ago that was. Maybe more than a day, maybe just an hour. Everything below his waist was covered in blood. Ripley was slowly working her way up his body with her blade.

His thighs were encircled by thin cuts from the tops of his knees to his groin. They bled freely and left him trembling. Were it not for the chains keeping him suspended, he would have collapsed long before now. She continued the run the blade lightly over his stomach and chest, teasingly outlining the shapes of his muscles, pressing the blade in just enough that he couldn’t help keening softly against it. Then she pressed it home, sliding the blade through the side of the muscle of his chest until the hilt pressed against his skin and he convulsed and screamed.

The soulbond flared along with the pain, and he clung to it as Anna twisted the blade in meat of him, anchoring himself to the warmth that was run through with dark currents of his own pain.

Ripley left the blade where it was, and took up another. Percy watched her through a haze of pain as she smiled.

“The workshop upstairs is yours, isn’t it, love?” she said, flipping the knife casually in her hand. She watched his face as he watched the blade. He couldn’t pull his eyes away from the metal glinting as it moved through the air.

His soulmate reached out from wherever they were and wrapped around his mind in a futile attempt at comfort. They couldn’t do anything to help him. He clung to them anyway.

Anna’s new blade cut a harsh deep gash from his collarbone to the soft place where his thigh met his body. As a raw yell escaped him, she leaned close to him and whispered in his ear with a horrid intimacy, “It’s polite to look at someone when they speak to you, Percival.”

Her knife blade lingered against the inside of his thigh for far too long. He knew she wouldn’t cut him badly there. He would bleed out and she didn’t want him dead.

Yet.

The thought brought a shallow bark of hysterical laughter choking out of him. Anna pressed the flat of the blade against his cock and with her other hand yanked the knife from his chest, smiling gently as the laughter turned into a sob.

The bond sparked with panic and pain at the same time as he did, and he was seized by an illogical urge to apologize to a person who would probably never hear his voice.

“Now,” her voice was calm and conversational, “the workshop upstairs is yours, yes?”

Gods, he hated her. He hated her. He hated her.

“Shall we reinforce the lesson, Percival?” she asked, dropping the bloodied knife she had pulled from his chest and pressing the new knife against the arch of his hip.

“Yes.” He said, his voice scraping out of his raw throat.

“Yes what?” the knife pressed harder, he felt blood drip down his side. Or maybe that was from his chest. There was so much blood and sweat and tears and fear everywhere and-

“The workshop. It’s mine.” he said.

Anna pulled the knife away from his side, and smoothed her palm up and down over where it had cut.

“Good boy.”

Her hand continued to stroke over his side and he could feel her eyes studying his face as he tried to remain still under her wandering hand. He wanted it to be worse than the blade, but everything hurt so much that even the horror of her touch was a welcome alternative to new pain.

She withdrew her hand, finally, and turned her back to him briefly, looking over her tools.

She had a nightmarish display of finely sharpened instruments that Percy couldn’t bear looking at for too long. She had only used knives thus far. He didn’t want to know what else was waiting for him. Amongst the tools there was an array of healing potions. She had forced one into him already after she had spent what seemed like forever using her knife to flay the skin from his back. That had been while she was still asking questions about whatever it was the Briarwoods thought was under the castle. Whatever fantasy they had slaughtered his family for.

Once it was clear he truly knew nothing about that, it had been all personal things.

She’d beaten his full name and the full names of all his siblings out of him, tore out the names of books he read as a child, and then began to pluck mathematical equations out of him like hell’s version of a tutor.

The room was also equipped with a wooden table with thick leather restraints built into it. It was already stained with his blood, now he longed to be bound to it again as he began to lose his battle with balance where he was hanging. His hands were locked into manacles with dull spikes on the inside, and pulled up far above his head to loop over a hook dangling from the ceiling. It left him standing precariously on only the balls of his feet. He had fallen once already and trying to regain his footing would have been painful enough on its own, but all he could think of as it was happening, as his arms were being slowly torn from their sockets, was that he could die just from this. Suffocate slowly from his hands being forced above his head.

He didn’t want to die like that.

Please, not like that.

Let it be quick, like his parents.

His death had already gone on so long.

Why didn’t he die with his parents? (With Whitney? With Vesper?)

In the end, he hadn’t been able to regain his footing on his own. When Ripley had tired of watching him struggle, she’d wrapped her hands around his waist and forced him back to his feet. Her hands lingering longer and softer than was necessary, taking the opportunity to wander as he heaved panicked breaths.

Then he had thrown up.

It was only bile, but Anna had slapped him for it anyway, throwing a bucket of ice cold water over him and leaving the room. He was alone, shivering and once again fighting for balance for hours as his soulmate’s fear and searching bled through his mind. He alternated between clinging to their presence and wishing he could claw them out of his skull. They were an impossibility, a thing of the world outside this room. He was uncertain that truly existed anymore.

Anna turned back to him from her collection of tools, and for a moment he was confused by what she was holding. It looked like a sewing needle, curved and threaded with a dark coarse thread. She smiled at him again and he realized what she was planning.

“I’ve been looking through your notebooks, Percival.” she said, as she stepped up close to his chest. He was taller than her, but with her so close to him he felt very, very small. She pressed the needle against the side of the wound she had just torn into the muscle of his chest. He flinched as she forced it through.

She continued steadily sewing the wound shut as she spoke, “You have some very interesting ideas. Such a clever boy.”

Percy tried to hold himself very, very still, but the coarse thread burned and that entire side of his chest felt as though someone had lit it on fire. When she roughly tied off the thread, jerking it forcefully so it pulled at the freshly mutilated skin, he gasped.

“So meticulous as well. Very fine detail work,” she turned her attention the the long slice she had made all down the front of him and Percy began to shake.

“I favor functionality over beauty, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a finely made tool when I see one.” She smirked at him, and slid one of her hands down to grasp his cock in a tight hold.

He couldn’t help it, he jerked away from her, pulling himself from her grip and tearing her needle out of his skin. He didn’t care. His soulmate was a shiver of fear making an echo of the hell in his head.

Anna gave him a mocking frown, “Alright clever boy, have it your way.”

She approached him again, but he pulled away as best he could. His best was not very good.

“Careful, sweetheart, or you’ll fall down again.”

It was true.

The thought of becoming that much more helpless in front of her right now made his shaking so intense that he nearly fell anyway.

He stilled, and forced himself to relax back as much as he could.

Ripley gave him an encouraging smile and her hands met him as he came back. He was shaking so hard that he could hear the chains above him rattling even about the pounding of his heart in his ears.

She returned to her stitching right where she’d left off, one hand driving the needle through carelessly and dragging the thread through with such force that it tore his skin as with each hole. Her other hand ran gently up and down his side, and every time it approached his hips he stiffened, which made her smile.

As she worked, she continued her commentary on his schematics and the combination of her voice, her hand against his side, and the predictable pain of the needle sent him into a daze. And he felt himself fading back until he was wrapped in the warmth of his soulmate’s presence, comforting even as he felt their fear. He sent apology after apology through the bond. He couldn’t send reassurance. He had none to give. He could only apologize. Apologize that they would never meet. That he hadn’t been able to save his family. That he couldn’t even save himself from the monster currently driving a needle through his skin. He was so very sorry and so very very afraid.

_i don’t want to hurt you i wish I could stop i’m so very sorry_

He only realized words had been making it past his lips when Anna jabbed the suture needle deep into the soft flesh beside his navel.

“Who are you talking to, love?”

 

* * *

 

 

After the first few minutes, Vex had managed to swallow the screams. The pain stayed, continuous and monstrous, but she fought through it. This was only an echo and it felt like it was swallowing her whole self. If she let it slow her down, she would never be able to stop it.

After a day and a half of agony, she was almost grateful for it. As long as she could feel the pain, shake from a fear that didn’t originate in her own mind, her soulmate was alive. Lulls in the agony kept filling her with dread until she grasped at the knot of grief and fear twisting the bond where her soulmate’s light and cleverness had been.

She’d been shouting _i’m coming for you_ through the bond with as much force as she could, infused with all the comfort she could muster. They wouldn’t hear her. She knew that. She kept forcing the thought through anyway.

Vax had been mostly silent as they walked, which Vex was endlessly grateful for. All her mind was spent on getting north and trying to pull as much information from her phantom injuries as she could. The only words they’d exchanged had been after Vex had been able to force the screaming to stop, biting back on shock until only the echo pain remained.

“They’re being tortured.” she’d hissed, voice a tense rasp.

Vax had his shoulder under her arm and looked at her strangely as he said, “Vex’halia, who the fuck is your soulmate.”

She breathed heavily through her nose for a minute, biting her tongue against another shout. Her back felt like it was on fire. The only response she could manage was a shake of her head. Right now, who they were didn’t matter so much to her as ending this nightmare.

Since then it had been silent. The twins and Trinket moving as quietly as possible through sheer force of habit.

Her soulmate’s fear spiked hard, and then she felt a flash of protective warmth before they pulled themself away from her tight grip on the bond. They were still there, but the were shutting her out, more intentionally than they had since this had begun. Vex was struck by a wave a nausea and reached a flailing mental hand towards them.

“We’re not moving fast enough.” she said, and shut down the logic of survival in her head that had been keeping her from running. They still felt so far away, if she didn’t run she might get there too late. It was already too late.

She began to bolt through the woods.

_hold on please hold on_

 

* * *

 

Percy breath came harshly through his nose. His eyes locked on a point somewhere beyond Anna’s elbow.

Anna dug the needle in deeper, and then twisted upward so he gasped.

“No one,” he said. He forced himself to release his death grip on the bond and shove its warmth away. She would not touch this. She could not have them.

She jerked the needle again, “Percival, we’ve already gone over the consequences for lying. Do we need to repeat the lesson?”

He shook his head, wincing as it made the needle shift, “No. No. There’s no one. I’m not talking to anyone.”

He didn’t need to be looking at her face to know that she was smiling again.

“Oh clever boy, you didn’t tell me that you had sparked.” Her hand grasped his chin and forced him to look at her. She let go of the needle, but left it where it was embedded in his stomach.

He still refused to meet her eyes, keeping his gaze focused on her cheek. There was an arc of his blood smeared across it. She dug her nails in until he could feel the skin breaking.

“You look at someone when they speak to you, Percival.” She hissed. When he did meet her eyes, she smoothed her fingertips over the new cuts. “You’re rather young for it. But you’ve always been precocious, haven’t you? I can tell.”

She released his chin, and patted him on the cheek like a fond parent.

“This changes things, doesn’t it,” she said, absentmindedly tugging the needle out and turning back to her tools.

Percy watched her as she tapped her fingers against her chin, her other hand on her hip as she studied the tools. A performance for his benefit, and he closed his eyes before he fell for it and followed her gaze to the table. Instead he concentrated on closing off his soulmate as much as he could. He had no idea how this could get worse, but life had been providing some extraordinary inspiration lately and if he could spare his soulmate even an instant of whatever was coming now he would do it. They shouldn’t have to be punished for his weakness.

The tension keeping him hanging released without warning, and his bloody legs collapsed at the shock of his full weight. He fell hard against the stonework, unable to cushion the blow, his head cracking hard against the stone. His head had been a lot since this began. Maybe his brain would hemorrhage and this could all just end. The thought was almost comforting.

The impact was still reverberating through his skull when he felt Anna take hold of the manacles and drag him to the wall. He heard more than felt her latch them to a ring. He wasn’t sure why she bothered, he couldn’t feel his arms and he couldn’t stand. His ability to fight had evaporated about the same time she had broken his glasses. He watched blearily as she prepared the table again.

As she stoked the fire with the brands heating in it.

As she made new selections of her tools.

She was humming to herself. He didn’t recognize the tune.

Or it was still the echo of the floor shaking his brain and his struggle to keep his soulmate separate from this. They were fighting him, and it was not easy to regain somewhat coherent thought while also forcing himself to refuse their wordless pleas for contact. Their fear was bitter metal in his mouth.

_let me give you this much let me save you from this let me go_

_just let me have this one thing_

Ripley finished whatever it was she was doing and came to stand over him, looking him up and down. Her gaze felt like fire. She kept studying him and he couldn’t stand to watch her anymore as she studied the blood she had forced from him, the tremor in his hands. Her gaze slid to his groin and he turned his face to the wall and took deep, steadying breaths against the cold stone.

_don’t look darling don’t look_

She unhooked the manacles from the wall and dragged him to the table.

 

* * *

 

Vax finally managed to convince her to rest after four hours going at a hard run. Vex was white as the winter cloud sky above them and covered in a sheen of sweat, with the halo of her dark hair and the haunted look in her eyes she looked more like a ghost than like his twin. She collapsed to the ground right where she was standing, wrapping her arms tightly around herself.

“They’re shutting me out.” She stared at the ground in front of her. “Everything still hurts.”

Vax leaned against a tree and slid down its trunk to sit on the ground as well.

“I think they’re sending me apologies.” One hand extricated itself from its death grip around her chest to bury itself in her hair as she curled up further.

“I’m so sorry, Vex’halia.” he said. He crawled over and draped himself around her, holding her taut form with as much strength as he could. With her against him, he could feel a fine tremor in her muscles. He himself was running purely on fear for her, which was not an unfamiliar state for him, but he wasn’t trying to cope with the echoes of literal torture while doing it. “You’ve got to try to sleep, though, sis. We’ll be no help if we run all the way there to collapse right on the doorstep.”

Her only answer was a more violent shudder and a bitten off gasp.

Vax felt Trinket’s warm bulk settle at their back and tried to get Vex to lean back against the bear. She resisted for a moment but gave in, and fell back against her bear. Her muscles remained strained, her eyes staring at things he couldn’t see.

He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, “Close your eyes. Try to sleep.” 

“I can’t, Vax.”

“Try.” he said, “I promise I will wake you soon. But you’re gonna be useless with no sleep at all, Vex, c’mon. You look like shit, sis. Thirty minutes will make a world of difference.”

“What if we’re too late?”

“Vex, I swear to whatever gods give a shit that we will find your soulmate. And we’ll tear whoever has done this limb from fucking limb, alright?” Vax said, his voice taking on a vicious bite that was unfamiliar to his own ears.

Vex pressed herself against his side, until it seemed that they could fold into one another entirely. They sat like that for some time, until Vex finally passed into a restless sleep with Vax and Trinket her watchful guards. Her body didn’t relax at all as she fell asleep. Vax was only able to tell she was unconscious by the fact that she could no longer hide the reactions of her body to the echos of wounds that weren’t hers. She twitched, keened, and at one point thrashed so viciously that she nearly gave Vax a black eye. None of it made her wake.

He had a feeling that it was lucky they stopped before she had collapsed as she ran.

It was no small part of Vax that hated Vex’s soulmate, whoever they were, for doing this to his sister. Whatever was being done to them was horrifying, but it was easy to hate a faceless stranger with his twin shaking in his arms. Part of him wondered if whatever was happening was deserved in some way. Maybe it was lucky that this was happening, that they might die before Vex ever got to meet them. If this was the kind of pain they brought with them, Vax didn’t want them near his sister.

A sleepy sort of curiosity pressed through one of his bonds as his anger blasted fire through his mind.

_not now not now not now_

The silent message seemed to be understood, because the pressure ceased and a warm embrace spread from the bond instead. Vax didn’t have the energy for this right now. He rarely did. Dealing with the pair of bonds at the back of his mind was terrifying enough on a good day. This was rather emphatically not a good day and Vax had had his fill of terror.

He fogged the space between him and his soulmate’s attempt at comfort, and watched the clouds shift in the sky overhead. It was getting colder. They’d covered a lot of ground, more than they had any right to expect to. But Vax could see the clouds darkening above them, a cold and threatening winter gray.

There was a storm heading their way.

 

* * *

 

Vex woke up spitting blood that wasn’t hers, a line of fire searing down the middle of her tongue. She wrenched herself from Vax’s arms, and vomited over the forest floor in front of them. She wanted to crawl out her skin and she wasn’t sure why. Her mind reached blindly for the soulbond and found it throbbing like a racing heartbeat and just as red. Whatever was happening, causing this horribly vivid echo, her soulmate had burrowed as far into the bond as they could while she was unconscious. Gone was the block, and she grasped at them desperately, though they didn’t seem to be aware enough to grasp back

_i promised and i don’t break promises i am coming for you_

_hold on just a little longer darling please_

She struggled to her feet, her legs were burning by now, but the illusory split in her tongue and the soul bleeding out in her brain were so much worse. 

“Vex?” Vax was heaving himself to his feet behind her, but she was already off running.

They were getting closer, she knew it. Just a little further and she would be able to stop this. Just a little further. Just a little further.

Her soulmate’s mind eventually faded to a dark pulse as they fell into unconsciousness again, but Vex kept running. Vax and Trinket fell behind at some point, but they were so close now she couldn’t stop.

It had started to snow.

 

* * *

 

Time was fragmented and nonsensical. Spaces missing, scenes were skipped. 

He wasn’t sure how he had gotten back to his cell, who had brought him there. Everything hurt and he wanted to die and he clutched at the soulbond in his head because Ripley was gone and he could smell them. The bodies. He was the only one left. And the bodies were piled unceremoniously in the cell next to him. Vesper’s head was separated from her body and flies swarmed over her eyes and there were rats on Julius’s bare chest and father had been rendered an unrecognizable mess but Percy could see the pocketwatch falling from the corpse’s pocket.

He couldn’t look but he couldn’t stop looking.

He clutched at the soulbond and it did nothing but hurt. He was going to die down here in this nightmare and then his body would be added to the pile to moulder and rot with the shreds of his family.

Or, what he was slowly grasping was a horrible likelihood, Ripley would keep him.

He tightened his grip on the bond until it blazed like white hot metal. His soulmate was shouting something down the bond, he recognized the pulses of their desperation by now, was intimately familiar with it in the same awful way he had become with the taste of his own blood. (His tongue still felt raw from where she had cut into it and healed it, cut into it and healed it, cut into it—) The same way he would never stop smelling the rotting bodies of his family.

Oh gods, Whitney’s hands were—

No. No don’t look. Don’t look.

_i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry_

Blank space. Darkness. Empty head.

Cassandra was standing in front of him. How was she alive? How was she not rotting in the cell beside him? There was no blood on her. Where had she been.

Cassandra was standing in front of him. Cassandra had her hands on his shoulders. Cassandra was shaking him.

“Percy!” she said it like she was repeating herself, desperate like the bond still beating at the back of his mind.

“Cass?” It was odd to still have a tongue, he’d been so certain it was gone.

“Percy, please, we have to go, we have to run please get up.” She pulled him up to his feet and he swayed against her for a moment. He hadn’t stood under his own power for….spaces. Blank dark spaces. Ripley’s hands.

She handed him something. He pulled it on. Cloth felt strange and painful against his ruined skin.

“The guards will be back soon. We have to run. You have to run. Percy, come on, please.” She grabbed his hand and pulled and somehow his body stumbled after her, eventually falling into a rhythm that could be called running. If one were being very forgiving with the definition.

The thought made him let loose an hysterical giggle that made Cassandra glance back at him and a spike of fear come through the bond. He had no comfort to offer either of them, just a wild smile on his lips that threatened to break into sobs or screams as he followed his sister. He was certain that at any moment he would blink and be back in the cell back on the table back in the dark looking at Cassandra’s dead glassy eyes.

It wasn’t until they stepped out of the tunnel and cold snow bit sharply into his bare feet that any part of him grasped that Cassandra might actually be real. He was out of the dungeon.

The stars were above him and the air moved around him and he had never been so grateful to feel the cold. A wild thrust of joy shook through him and he felt his soulmate pull at it, afraid. He stumbled to a halt, unable to do anything but stand and breathe.

_i’m out it’s alright it won’t hurt anymore i promise i promise i’ll find you and we’ll be safe_

He would have stayed rooted to that spot until he froze to death but Cassandra yanked him forward again and terror flooded back. Percy ran faster than before, the cold air thin in his lungs. Now that he was out, the thought of being dragged back was a black hole of horror.

His feet were numb and blue and bleeding but he didn’t care. He and his sister bolted through the frozen trees, nearly shoulder to shoulder, neither wasting breath on anything but running. The occasional brush of her hand against his made it as real as the pain.

 

* * *

 

“Something’s changed.” Vex said. She had stopped dead, frozen like she was listening very hard for a sound that she wasn’t sure was real. 

“What?” Vax stopped next to her, hands braced on his knees, bent over and hauling breaths of thin winter air. His breath curled like dragon smoke in front of him.

Vex only stared ahead into the darkness, transfixed on an oncoming dread she couldn’t name. Swallowed by the inescapable sense that whatever truly terrible thing she had been waiting for these past few days, this whole vicious trek, was just about to happen. There was a horrible moment of bright joy and promise through the bond, true and with a razor edge of hysteria. It sliced her heart and she couldn’t breathe.

The snow stuck to her hair and eyelashes. They were so close now, the bond pulled taut between them by proximity.

Close enough to hear a scream echo through the wood.  


* * *

 

 

The guards were gaining on them. Every few heartbeats, an arrow would fly through the air just past them. Percy’s heart felt as though it was going to explode out of his chest. He wouldn’t go back. The very concept had his vision narrowed to pinpricks as he and Cassandra raced through the trees. He vacillated between hearing nothing but his own blood pounding in his ears, and being absolutely fixated on the sound of his feet in the snow and the shouts of the guards behind them. 

The hiss of an arrow as it just missed him.

Somewhere ahead, not far now, the rush of a river twisted through the trees. A week ago, Percy could have given the name of the river. At that moment, he couldn’t even come up with his own. Everything was running and breathing and please, gods, not back to the room with Ripley, not back to the cell with the bodies.

He didn’t notice that Cassandra had fallen behind until there was a short, breathless scream from behind him. He stopped short, overbalanced, and landed hard on his hands and knees as he tried to turn.

On all fours in the red snow, he saw his little sister a few yards behind him lying face down in the snow. She was utterly still. There were three arrows sprouting from her back like malformed feathers. His vision was obscured by pale twists of mist and he realized he was hyperventilating. Percy scrambled to his feet, the guards close enough that he could see them through the trees even in the dark.

He ran. And ran.

He didn’t see the cliff edge until he’d already fallen.

After that, everything was dark. Quiet.

A warm light at the back of his mind faded to little more than a dim glow and Percy faded with it.

 

* * *

 

In the weeks following the mad dash through the woods, Vex moved as though in a haze. She went through the motions of her life with the shell of herself firmly reinforced, putting on an admirable performance of normalcy. If it weren’t for the madness of the the run through the woods, the sense memory twinges in her body from pain that wasn't hers, she would even have Vax fooled.

The twins and Trinket lingered in a northern village. Vex didn’t feel a directional pull from her soulmate anymore. She had felt almost nothing from them since that last awful night in the woods.

Where once the bond was a small sun at the back of her mind, it was now a low burning candle in dense fog. She was afraid to get too close. Everytime she tried, it seemed like the flame might extinguish entirely. The torture had stopped, and for that she was grateful, but the faded half-there thing her soulmate had become was terrifying in its own way. At least when they were being tortured, she could feel them. Now she had a barely a sign of their continued existence.

 _i love you i’ll find you be safe_  

She sent comfort down the bond as she lay beside Trinket at night, and received nothing in return. She did a lot of crying when she knew Vax couldn’t hear.

Then came the night when everything ended.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> eyyyyyyyyy it's been a while
> 
> so like the Semester Happened and then Fic Didn't
> 
> but we're back now it's all good. it's real short, but i wanted to get something up and i promise there's more comin'.
> 
> happy christmas have some pain and sadness

On a fishing boat at sea, Percy was dreaming.

Before the Briarwoods, he had only rarely remembered his dreams. Now he had trouble forgetting. He woke shaking and crying more often than not. The habit had won him his own sleeping space on the small fishing boat. The rest of the twenty man crew slept in three rooms, Percy slept by himself in what could generously be called a repurposed cabinet. He didn’t care as long as he got to stay on the ship.

This dream was not a bad one.

The dream was dark. Endless and all encompassing darkness that enclosed Percy entirely, but he was not afraid. The grip of it was almost comforting, edging only slightly on dangerous. It was so nice to not be hurting that he didn’t mind. Two glowing yellow eyes watched him. The voice that came out of the dark was blissfully unfamiliar. It felt like some vicious part of himself and he clung to it, desperate to feel something other than grief or terror or emptiness. The anger in the voice was a balm, the vengeance it promised a medicine.

“Death should be answered with death.” It crooned, “Pain answered with pain. I can show you the answer to what has been done. I ask but a small thing in return…”

The voice offered a bargain from a pair of glowing yellow eyes, and Percy accepted because after all, it was only a dream.

 

* * *

 

Many miles away, far inland, Vex was waking up. 

She opened her eyes and knew something was wrong. The stars still shone above her, the sky uninterrupted black with dawn far off. Sitting up from the careful nest she had built in a tall tree’s branches, she tried to discover what had woken her. At the base of the tree, Trinket looked up and made a questioning groan.

“It’s okay, buddy.” She said, just loud enough for the bear to hear. He harrumphed and settled himself back down, returning to his self-appointed guard duty.

She had half thought that perhaps sensing her brother’s return, but Vax was off in the city doing something for the Clasp and Vex was alone in her perch. The night was as still as it ever got in a forest. There was no wind tonight, but insects still sang their buzzing songs. She could hear something light footed moving in the trees somewhere to the east, almost definitely a deer. Vex felt safe in saying that she was the most dangerous thing in these woods for at least a few miles.

Slipping out of her hammock, Vex clambered farther up the tree. She reached the treetop and looked out from her vantage point, but nothing new revealed itself. In the distance, she could see the guard lamps in Stillben and spared a moment to hope Vax wasn’t being more of an idiot than usual.

The gray twist of anxiety that had woken her would not be satisfied, though. She wanted to run, the urge almost as strong as it had been before the bad week, but directionless. That horrible thought gave her pause.

Vex had been treating the bond so cautiously since it had gone candlelight dim. Whispers of emotion were all she had dared send. The screams and shouts and long ago laughter felt as though they would extinguish it entirely. She prayed to the gods that had never answered before and turned her attention to her soulmate as her chest went tight.

_darling_

Her soulmate was there, the ghost of a thing their bond had become told her that much. They felt as distant as they had since the bad week.

_darling please_

She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, exactly. Sometimes the candle flickered in response to her prodding, it never gave anything back but she at least knew the feeling had gotten through. There was nothing now. The dull flame remained unchanged. The anxiety had begun to twist itself into nausea. Her knuckles had gone white where she gripped the branches and the bark dug sharply into her palms.

_i just need to know you’re there darling_

The only response was a chill like fog rolling in over her mind. It spilled from what remained of her soulmate on the other side of the bond as the small warm light faded. Terror spiked through her, and unthinking she reached for the bond full force. She knew what had woken her.

_no no no don’t go please don’t go stay with me it’ll be alright please stay stay stay_

Dying. They were dying. She’d never seen their face and they were dying. Vex reached for the back of her head grasping at air, as though she could catch the bond and save them. She felt herself lose balance on the tree as the light flickered once...twice...

_please_

By the time she hit the ground, Vex was alone.

**Author's Note:**

> No onscreen rape, but Ripley is sexually creepy and handsy. There are implications of sexual violence occurring off screen. 
> 
> Percy is also...dissociating? I guess? Shit's bad in his head, man.


End file.
